Page 1838 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 8 June 2022
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(c) continue to work with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation to negotiate the implementation, management and review of the next phase of ratios through the ACT Public Sector Nursing and Midwifery Enterprise Agreement; and
(d) continue to progress work on the Territory-Wide Health Workforce Plan to support a sustainable health workforce in the ACT.
I circulate this amendment both to correct some errors in Ms Castley’s original motion and to update the chamber on the circumstances. This particular amendment calls for ratio compliance and compliance measures to be publicly reported by the health service each month—not each quarter, but each month. That is what we were already planning to do. We already have a quarterly performance report on health system data, and we already report compliance through the steering committee for the implementation of nurse-patient ratios.
The amendment also clarifies some of the processes around this. I have to give Ms Castley some credit here, because, unlike one of her predecessors, who used FOI and took up a lot of public servants’ time on thousands and thousands of pages of documents and basically never used them, at least Ms Castley is using the documents. They might be out of date, and she might be misinterpreting and misunderstanding what is going on, but at least she is making use of the documents! Without asking for any updates on how we are going at the moment, as we get close to the end of the amnesty period that has been agreed with the AMNF, she has the chutzpah to get out there and say, “These figures from February, two weeks into the implementation of ratios, are not fully complying”!
As a bit of background for Ms Castley, ACT Labor and the ACT Greens went to the 2020 election committing to the implementation of nurse-patient ratios. The Canberra Liberals did not. No such commitment was made by the Canberra Liberals to the implementation of nurse-to-patient ratios. I did not hear any apology for that from Ms Castley. I did not hear any explanation as to why the Canberra Liberals did not commit to nurse-to-patient ratios in the 2020 election. I invite her, in closing, to commit the Canberra Liberals to the ongoing implementation of nurse-patient ratios. That would make them the first Liberal Party in the country to be committed to nurse-to-patient ratios. The ACT is the third jurisdiction in the country to commit to nurse-patient ratios after the two other Labor jurisdictions of Victoria and Queensland. We are very proud of that election commitment, and we are proud to be delivering on that election commitment.
On that note, I will table the latest reporting of the ratio implementation working group from Canberra Health Services:
Overall CHS Ratio Compliance—Point in Time—Period 23 to 29 May 2022.
I do not have up-to-date data from Calvary to provide at this point in time, but I am tabling the compliance report from Canberra Health Services. It is, as Mr Daniel has talked about, a point-in-time report for the period 23 May to 29 May, and overall Canberra Health Services is 89 per cent compliant for this point-in-time report. This is
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